THE SILENT LANGUAGE OF ANIMALS 183 



telegraph aids in the search. Yet, without any 

 of these accessories, the wild creatures have mar- 

 vellous systems of communication. The five 

 senses (and perhaps a mysterious sixth, at which 

 we can only guess) are the telephones and the 

 police, the automatic sentinels and alarms of our 

 wild kindred. Most inferior are our own abilities 

 in using eyes, nose, and ears, when compared 

 with the same functions in birds and animals. 



Eyes and noses are important keys to the bright 

 colours of birds and comparative sombreness of 

 hairy-coated creatures. Take a dog and an oriole 

 as good examples of the two extremes. When a 

 dog has lost his master, he first looks about ; then 

 he strains his eyes with the intense look of a near- 

 sighted person, and after a few moments of this 

 he usually yelps with disappointment, drops his 

 nose to the ground, and with unfailing accuracy 

 follows the track of his master. When the fresh- 

 ness of the trail tells him that he is near its end 

 he again resorts to his eyes, and is soon near 

 enough to recognise the face he seeks. A fox 

 when running before a hound may double back, 

 and make a close reconnaissance near his trail, 

 sometimes passing in full view without the 

 hound's seeing him or stopping in following out 

 the full curve of the trail, so completely does the 

 wonderful power of smell absorb the entire atten- 

 tion of the dog. 



Let us now turn to the oriole. As we might 



